Understanding Nature and Human Beings from a New Perspective —— An Introduction to the Deep History of the Earth

Introduction II. Macroscale and diversity: another way to look at history and sci

Understanding Nature and Human Beings from a New Perspective —— An Introduction to the Deep History of the Earth

Introduction II. Macroscale and diversity: another way to look at history and science? Many people have been to the National Museum of Natural Science in Taichung, and the author is no exception. For a big boy who can remember all the dinosaur names in the picture book, the blog pavilion is a paradise. One of the most representative exhibition halls, Life Science Museum, has a vivid impression as yesterday, even though it was 20 years ago when I last visited it. After passing through the wonderful gate, the life history of the earth for more than three billion years began all the way, from its origin, evolution, landing on land until dinosaurs ruled the earth. The journey arrived at the dinosaur hall-Tyrannosaurus roared and Brachiosaurus fell from the sky with its neck hanging down. Spectacular fossil skeletons and active models are enough to excite children. However, the story of life history is not over yet, and the distant ancestors of mankind have quietly appeared. Lucy stared at the tourists, and the Beatles melody echoed in the distance.

This epic about the earth and the long river of life is a classic narrative familiar to museum regulars or fans of popular science books. The classic lies not only in the grand scale of the story, but also in answering the enduring question of mankind from a scientific point of view: who are we? Where do we come from? Where are we in nature? It reveals that life has evolved over hundreds of millions of years and become a conscious creature in the world today; As the earth stage of life evolution, it has also experienced 4.5 billion years.

The Epic of the Earth and the Long River of Life is a classic narrative familiar to museum visitors or lovers of popular science books. For today's readers, pixabay's long history of 4.5 billion years has become a natural "common sense". This common sense is often used to show the victory of human reason over religious superstition in popular science narration. Christianity believes that God created everything in the world, and some people even calculate that the history of the earth from God's creation to the birth of Jesus Christ is only more than 4,000 years. At the moment when "the wisdom of the people is wide open", such an idea is undoubtedly ridiculous. Just as Copernicus removed the earth from the center of the universe and Darwin reduced human beings to animals governed by natural laws, the understanding of the deep history of the earth has also become the best example of scientific progress.

However, is "nature has its own long history" really that obvious? Is this "revolutionary" process of changing human concepts really so natural?

The book The Deep History of the Earth written by Martin ruvik, a British historian of science, aims to answer these questions. Ruvik pointed out that people's understanding of the deep history of the earth is not so taken for granted, but it takes a tortuous and complicated path to construct and determine today's "common sense". In this tortuous process, there is no flat face in black and white, whether it is a scientist hero or a stubborn believer who hinders the progress of knowledge.

First of all, ruvik's academic background and experience cannot be ignored in the Christian linear view of history. He is a senior researcher in the history of science. He has taught in Cambridge University, Free University of Amsterdam, University of California, San Diego and other institutions, specializing in the history of 18 and 19 th century geology, earth sciences, fields and museums. He is not a pure academic humanist-before he turned to the special study of the history of science, he was a professional geologist with scientific training and rich field work experience. His research results on the history of earth science before Darwin are praised as "authoritative and far-reaching influence on academic circles" His achievements in life have been affirmed by many awards, including the Sutton Medal, the highest honor in the history of science in 2007. And the book "The Deep History of the Earth" also won the Dingle Award for the Best Popular Monograph of the Year awarded by the British Society for the History of Science in 20 15.

Ruvik's background puts him in a special position and enables him to have a comprehensive view of the overall situation. As a former scientific researcher, the author is naturally quite familiar with the present situation of earth science and its knowledge norms, which makes his attempt to provoke-not to challenge or overthrow the case, but at least to provoke and * * *-to reflect on the existing standard narrative. This kind of ridicule is common in books, such as Stena's Principle of Superposition and Hutton's Father of Geology. From time to time, the author also reveals the "gossip" of the earth science community that he personally participated in or watched, especially when talking about the development in the second half of the twentieth century, which makes this book not only a usual knowledge narrative, but also a personal opinion from the perspective of the parties.

The linear view of history is one of the greatest influences that Christianity has brought to western culture and scholarship. In addition, from many details in the book, it is not difficult for readers to understand that Ruwick himself is a devout Christian. His familiarity with biblical allusions and Christian knowledge makes him better able to understand the thoughts and speeches of some religious fundamentalists than ordinary scientists who are indifferent to religion or even advocate atheism, and his condemnation of the "creationism" movement (see appendix) is also more penetrating. Religious belief and scientific truth-seeking are not always incompatible as the public imagines. Luvik's personal belief does not hinder his research on the history of science, but enables him to gain insight into the inheritance of Christianity in modern science and humanistic development.

One of the greatest influences of Christianity on western culture and scholarship is the concept of linear history. At the beginning of this book, ruvik began to sort out the idea that "the world has a unique starting point and an irreversible linear history", which originated from Judaism and continued to develop in Christianity and Christianity. Linear history can be described as the characteristics of Abraham's religious belief: from the creation of God, through a series of events (such as the stories described in the Old Testament), to the arrival, sacrifice and even return of the Savior (the Messiah) to meet the final judgment of the end. This worldview with a strong sense of time direction is in sharp contrast with the "circular view" of time or the "steady view" of the universe of other cultures (such as ancient Greek philosophers).

Take China as an example. Although there was a continuous and systematic practice of historical writing in ancient China, the original meaning of "history" was only an official who recorded events, emphasizing the recording of historical events, rather than a linear time from beginning to end, as in the tradition of Abrahamic religion. Therefore, although there are ancient and modern differences between "past" and "present" in China tradition, there is no linear view of history. Even, influenced by the Yin-Yang School's "Five Virtues at the Beginning" to explain the change of dynasties, or similar thoughts in Confucianism, Buddhism and Taoism tend to be a kind of circular theory. The discussion on the history of thought or historiography has been discussed in depth in the works of Du Fu, Wang Fansen and other predecessors. Interested readers can refer to it separately, so I won't go into details here.

Ruvik pointed out that the linear historical view of Christianity has a far-reaching influence on the scientific research of the earth's history. For Europeans in early modern times, what is recorded in the Bible is not a religious myth, but a real historical event. Especially when Europeans come into contact with more documents and records of ancient civilizations, such as Egyptian, Babylonian and China, and compare the Bible with these foreign records, they have to mediate the contradiction between the two works sooner or later. Therefore, the famous theory of Wu Xue, the chronicler of the17th century mentioned at the beginning of this book-God created everything in 4004 BC-may seem absurd to people today, but it was a serious and scientific attempt to Christians at that time. Wu Xue used the method of chronology to collect and compare sacred and vulgar documents in various languages, trying to sort out and reconstruct a detailed and accurate timeline of world history.

Wu Xue, the archbishop of the Irish Catholic Church, tried to construct a timeline of world history based on the Bible with the method of chronology. Pexels When we compare the attempts of Wu Xue and contemporary European chroniclers with historians in other regions, it is not difficult to find that the former is actually quite special. Although China's ancient historiography is developed, there are also annals of history books such as Chunqiu and Zitongzhijian, but the starting point of annals is limited, which does not trace back to the whole starting point of creation. Sima Qian's biographical history "Historical Records" begins with the five emperors in ancient legends, but it does not use some absolute ruler to measure the "exact" position of the deeds of the five emperors on the time axis. It can be said that the pursuit of accurate and quantitative dating by western chroniclers is driven by their religious beliefs, but it also promotes historical research to the level of "historical science".

The starting point of the world is "4004 BC", which is of course an outdated speculation. Regardless of success or failure, if science is a method of "systematically observing, measuring and experimenting, and constructing, testing and correcting hypotheses" (here I quote the definition in the Oxford English Dictionary), then it is hard to say that Wu Xue's thoughts and practices are not "scientific" through careful textual research and comparison of the collected materials by chronology. Scientists who study the history of the earth in later generations have different methods or techniques, but their interests are the same as martial arts.

The interaction between humanities and science has influenced the chroniclers in17th century to integrate cross-cultural and different language documents (including the Bible, which they regard as the most important historical data) to date human history, not only based on man-made cultural relics, but also based on the records of astronomical phenomena such as comets and eclipses. Nature itself is full of "cultural relics", such as fossils, shells, precious stones and minerals. If readers have been to museums, it is not difficult to imagine that these "natural cultural relics" are treasures in the eyes of collectors, just like cultural relics, books and documents. The famous British Museum originally collected the above-mentioned natural relics, but only in modern times was this part split into an independent exhibition hall, which is today's London Museum of Natural History.

Another important point put forward by ruvik in this book is the interaction between humanities (history) and natural science. He pointed out that "scholars" in early modern Europe (at that time, there was no concept of "scientist" in the modern sense) stole historians' tools, especially the concepts and methods of chronology, and transferred the research object from the cultural field to the natural world, laying the foundation for later exploration of earth history. Since man-made cultural relics can be used to reconstruct human history, there is no reason to say that natural cultural relics cannot be used as evidence of natural history. Mountains, rivers, lakes, oceans and creatures living in them are not only the fixed scenery of human historical dramas, but also have their own dramatic changes. In early modern Europe, naturalists (people who study natural history) repeatedly dialectical the rationality of the earth's history and biblical narrative by using natural cultural relics, and then realized that the earth's past was longer than originally thought, and even human beings appeared in it later. This time span has gradually extended from the spectrum of thousands of years claimed by Wu Xue to millions of years, and finally extended to 4.5 billion years recognized as "common sense" today.

Darwin, who wrote The Origin of Species, was a naturalist who started from geological research. The above twists and turns of Pixabay have been expounded by the author in this book, so I won't repeat them here. We can know how the development of natural history is inspired by humanistic and historical methods from the author's narrative. Natural history and "natural philosophy" which explores the factors and laws that cause natural phenomena constitute two major departments of modern western science. Specialized fields such as biology and geology are differentiated from natural and historical traditions. Before the specialization of modern science, at least in the era of "scholars", there was no strict distinction between disciplines, and the overlap between humanities and natural sciences was quite common.

Darwin was a naturalist, starting with geological research. Although this book is not devoted to Darwin's theory of evolution, the evolution of biological species and the deep history of the earth, these two issues have been complementary since the seventeenth century, although the former has attracted more public attention because of Darwin's fame. When the theory of evolution was gradually accepted by western intellectuals in the middle of19th century, scientific discourses such as the theory of evolution and the theory of progress penetrated back into all fields of humanities, including history. We can get a glimpse of the knowledge network of different disciplines from the summary quoted by the author.

Even within the natural sciences, different disciplines or sects have their own positions, and the interpretation of the same thing may be very different. For example, physicists have laughed at geologists' hundreds of millions of estimates of the earth's age, arguing that this contradicts the physical rate at which the earth gradually cooled from the beginning. The argument between Darwin's close friend Lyle and contemporary scholars is also analyzed in this book. Lyle inherited the views of Hutton and others, arguing that the subtle influences of water erosion, sedimentation and weathering that existed all the time around us also existed in the distant past. These "present factors" have shaped all the geological landscapes and kept the earth in a balanced and stable state. This theory of "uniformity" (or translated into gradual change theory, however, "uniformity" is more in line with the essence of his core thought) has a profound influence on Darwin, so that when Darwin thinks about species evolution, he also thinks that this process is a subtle change accumulated from generation to generation, rather than a sudden and sharp "mutation". Lyle advocated the theory of equalization and consciously opposed the "disaster theory", arguing that there had been violent influences beyond the present scale in the history of the earth, such as a huge tsunami or volcanic eruption, which caused the present earth environment. Catastrophic theory is easily associated with the great flood mentioned in the Bible, which Lyle, who advocates human rationality and is eager to think about reform, wants to get rid of quickly.

Because of Lyle's prominent position in today's geology textbooks and his close alliance with Darwin, it is easy to ignore the fact that people like Lyle and Darwin who insisted on variational methods were a minority in the geological circles at that time. As ruvik pointed out, others are not idiots, but have good reasons to refute the mutation theory. Many geologists pay attention to the discontinuous interface between strata, thinking that it is evidence of the environment before and after the change of major events, and record it in various geological years (just as historians record different dynasties or periods, this is another example similar to humanities and natural sciences). Paleontologists also tend to be cataclysmic; In their eyes, fossil evidence not only shows the direction of evolution, but also shows that sudden mass extinction or rapid explosion of biological species did happen. This makes paleontologists doubt Darwin's evolutionary model of "changing generations slowly" even if they accept the theory of evolution. Moreover, according to the variational theory, the earth, which kept a constant balance, had only a dull long time in the past, and there was no linear "history" full of ups and downs and events at all. This image is difficult to convince most geologists and biologists who are trying to reconstruct the evolutionary pedigree with fossils.

Who is right and who is wrong about mutation and mutation theory? Maybe both factions are right or wrong, depending on the angle (or scale). Both factions have some problems, such as seeing the trees but not the forest, or like the blind touching the elephant. They are all groping for part of the "truth", but they accuse each other of not seeing the whole picture.

The new way of looking at history, religion and science deserves readers' attention. As a popular "popular science" book, this book deliberately avoids or even opposes the Whig writing method of the history of science. The so-called Whig Party originally refers to the Whig Party in British history, and its supporters are willing to describe the British political history as a history of parliamentary democracy. In short, historical figures are divided into good people or bad people who promote or hinder democratic progress, and historical events are judged based on this value.

The "glory format" values divide people and things into narratives that promote and hinder progress. Pisabe's writing of the history of science often falls into the mode of "luminous format" and is rendered as a confrontation to promote or hinder scientific progress. The classic narrative of "scientific revolution" is an example. Taking Copernicus, Kepler, Galileo and Newton as the same "orthodoxy" highlights the value of these great scientific men (even some martyrs) to enlightenment and progress, while ignoring the historical content and context of their theories, which may be very different from today's cognition. The opposition between "science" and "religion" is often infinitely magnified in the interpretation of Hui format. Ruvik believes that after a careful examination of history, we can find that this view of "repeated essential conflicts between science and religion" cannot stand the test. As mentioned above, the author has repeatedly expressed his opposition to the writing style of great men, that is, criticizing the standard narrative of scientific ancestors in popular science books and scientific systems.

Ruvik reminds readers to clarify the myths created by fundamentalists. The so-called "fundamentalism" here is not only the religious camp, but also the atheistic fundamentalism in the scientific community, both of which are equally extreme in the author's eyes. Of course, the author's judgment here naturally has his religious belief position, and readers can judge for themselves whether his writing conforms to his impartiality.

In a word, The Deep History of the Earth is not only a popular science book about how human beings know the long history of the Earth, but also a history of exploring the development of earth science from many angles. In this tortuous and complicated process of knowledge exploration, various cross-cultural and interdisciplinary knowledge resources are integrated, and different knowledge groups also participate in it with their own viewpoints and methods, which dialectically interact or influence each other. The meaning of "history" has also expanded. It turns out that "history" refers to the deeds of human past activities, especially the history of faith based on written records. Since people appropriated the concept of chronology to nature, explored the development process of the earth and life, greatly expanded the time span of the earth, and realized that nature has its own history, human beings appeared in the last scene of this play. The pursuit of the origin of human beings has produced the concept and category of "prehistory".

This set of macro-narrative, which integrates the deep history of the earth (even the universe), the evolution of life, the prehistory of mankind and the history of belief, is a common way to interpret the world in scientific circles and museums, but modern historians rarely talk about it. In recent years, some historians have called it "Great History" and publicized it (be careful not to confuse it with the "Great History" of Huang Renyu, a famous scholar in China. The so-called "Great History" here was initiated by an American historian (〔David Christian〕), who wrote many books to explain this idea, and Taiwan Province Province of China also published a Chinese version. )。 However, as can be seen from this book, there is nothing new in this macro narrative. At least when17th century chroniclers tried to reconstruct the timeline from creation to the present, they took a small step to explore the world.

-This article is taken from the book Deep History of the Earth: A Neglected Geological Revolution, A History of Everything on the Earth, selected by Xinzhi.com in April 20021year, Left Bank Culture. Related Tags: Humanities, Earth, Deep History, Earth Science, Christianity, Linear History, Natural Science, Luminous Format Darwin Martin. Ruvik Yahoo Newham Pi Radar Carnation